Deep in the bowels of the US state department, not far from the cafeteria, there is a small office identified only by a handwritten sign on the door reading: The Future of Iraq Project.

Such is the ramshackle reality lying beneath the Bush administration's pronouncements on regime change in Baghdad. There is little doubt that the Pentagon is devising invasion plans in deadly earnest, but the parallel effort to build a political alternative has been half-hearted to say the least. In fact it is in retreat on several fronts.

The secret side of this "unconventional war" has not been going any more convincingly. Recent administration leaks have confirmed that there was a presidential directive to the CIA in February, ordering the agency to topple Saddam Hussein, with extreme prejudice if neces sary. But here again, the reality seems to be falling far short of the hype.

Already stretched and humiliated in the hunt for al-Qaida, CIA agents have been approaching would-be allies among the Iraqi opposition who have little reason to trust them, having been let down by Washington twice before.

Morale is so poor in the CIA that, in recent testimony to Congress, its director, George Tenet, admitted the agency had no more than a 15% prospect of carrying out its presidential order.

The CIA was taught a sobering lesson on its lowly standing among Iraqi rebel groups on its own home ground in April.

The agency runs a boot camp near Williamsburg in Virginia for its paramilitary units, which played an important role in Afghanistan. It is officially called Camp Perry, but inside the CIA it known simply as The Farm. Alongside the training camp it has a "black" area which serves as a venue for the secret side of US diplomacy. Foreign leaders, rebels or agents can be flown in without the complications of visas and customs, for meetings that officially never happen.

In late April, The Farm was the site of delicate talks with Kurdish leaders, aimed at persuading them to cooperate in the effort to topple President Saddam. The guests of honour were Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), and Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) - the only opposition with significant troop numbers and territory under their control.

The KDP and PUK confirm the meeting took place but officially insist it took place in Germany. Privately Kurdish opposition officials confirm they flew to Virginia.

A US intelligence source also told the Guardian that the encounter took place at The Farm and that the US was represented by CIA officials and General Wayne Downing, the president's military adviser on counter-terrorism and the author of a 1998 plan to unseat Saddam relying heavily on local opposition and US air power.

"The idea was to see what the Kurds would be prepared to do in a war on Baghdad," the US source said.

Specifically, the Kurds were asked to agree to the establishment of CIA stations at their headquarters in Irbil and Suleimaniyah, but they demurred. According to one account, Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani asked for more money than the CIA was prepared to offer.

However, according to a Kurdish source, the meeting failed for a more fundamental reason: lack of trust. The Kurds had been encouraged to rise up against Saddam twice, in 1991 and 1995, and both times Washington had abandoned them to the Iraqi army. In 1995, the CIA pulled the plug on the insurrection 48 hours before it was due to begin.

"We wanted to know if that was going to happen again. If Saddam struck at us, would we be protected?" the Kurdish opposition activist said.

At one point, the Kurds reportedly asked whether the US officials at The Farm really represented the entire administration, and so Ryan Crocker, a state department official who had visited Kurdistan a few months earlier, was hastily called in from Washington. No senior Pentagon officials attended.

It was hardly a convincing demonstration of US resolve, and the American representatives were unable to provide the assurances the Kurds were seeking.

Denounced

Last week, Mr Barzani denounced the secret war, telling the Guardian: "We cannot stop the US [from taking covert action], but we would like there to be transparency and clarity, and for there to be no covers or curtains to hide behind."

The White House announced Gen Downing's resignation after less than a year as counter-terrorism adviser. But a spokesman denied that his departure had anything to do with the fact that he lost his battle to persuade the administration to support a guerrilla campaign by Iraqi rebel groups against Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the understaffed and underfunded Future of Iraq Project has been spending more effort struggling with other government departments than plotting Saddam's downfall. Two US-sponsored meetings aimed at bringing members of the Iraqi opposition together have been put off indefinitely. One was to have been a seminar in Washington for Iraqi ex-officers in exile. It was to have taken place under the auspices of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), with the backing of the Pentagon and members of Congress who view the INC, a London-based umbrella organisation, as the rightful vanguard of the opposition.

However, the state department, convinced that the INC is corrupt and unreliable, dragged its feet on issuing visas to the Iraqi generals in Europe, who were themselves sceptical about the role of the INC and its leading figure, Ahmed Chalabi. Ultimately Congress grew impatient and suspended the funding.

The state department has simultaneously been trying to organise another Iraqi opposition conference in Europe, to talk about life after Saddam. Mr Chalabi lobbied against the meeting among his friends at the defence department and in Congress, and the conference has consequently been put on hold.

The state department has also cut off funds to the INC's intelligence gathering effort, which smuggled defectors and information about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq.

The shambles of the political struggle might suggest that the Bush administration is not serious about getting rid of the Iraqi dictator. But Many analysts believe that the lack of effort invested in building political alliances simply reflects the fact that the Bush administration does not attach much importance to them.

"My theory is that the US government is going to want to do this on its own, on the basis that if you work with the Kurds and the Shi'ites you're going to end up with three Iraqs rather than one," said John Pike, who runs a Washington security thinktank, GlobalSecurity.org.

In a forthcoming paper for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, a strategic analyst, argues: "The US has shown in the past that it can execute military operations without any clear plan for conflict termination and nation building.

"The American military culture seems to feel its responsibility ends with strategy and grand strategy is the province of politicians and God."